Thursday, October 1, 2015

Aloha to the Anglican Communion

The Hawaiian word aloha, since the nineteenth century, has come to have three
meanings in English. Each meaning is applicable to the future of the Anglican
Communion.

First, and most consistent with the word's
Polynesian roots, aloha may mean
love, peace, or compassion. Members of the Anglican Communion, all members of Christ's
body, appropriately have feelings of love, peace, and compassion for one
another. The conflicts of the last two decades within the Communion have
tested, strained, and, sometimes, broken those bonds. However, genuine aloha
should set the tone for relationships between the churches, leaders, and individual
members of the Anglican Communion.

Second, aloha
also means hello. The Archbishop of
Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, has convened a January 2016 summit of
the primates of the Anglican Communion's constituent churches. He has also
invited the head of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) to attend part
of the meeting. Heretofore, the ACNA has been excluded from Anglican meetings.
Geography, historical ties to the Church of England's missionary efforts, and
ongoing communion with the see of Canterbury, not a group's use of the word Anglican or theological/liturgical claims
of being Anglican, has defined who is and is not Anglican.

Times of changed. Canon Giles Fraser of St. Paul's
Cathedral in London contends in a column
in The Guardian that the internet
and hypertext sealed the fate of a hierarchy being able to define a group's
theological identity. In my experience, few people in the pews of US Episcopal
congregations or those of the Church of England understand, much less care
about, the Anglican Communion. Anglicanism has always been a muddled approach
to Christianity, as Andrew Gerns at the Episcopal Café has editorialized.
So, let's say hello to a new model of
being Christian together, one that forsakes structural and doctrinal unity for promoting
communication, broadening horizons, honoring differences, seeking
commonalities, and together incarnating God's love as and when possible.

Third, aloha
also means goodbye. It's time to farewell
efforts to develop an Anglican covenant and perhaps to the Lambeth convocations
of bishops. The former is, in nautical terminology, dead in the water. Archbishop
Rowan Williams' commendable efforts to preserve the Anglican Communion through
establishing minimal doctrinal and structural unity failed. The latter, the Archbishop
of Canterbury convening a gathering of all Anglican bishops once every ten years,
was during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the best mechanism for preserving
ties within the Anglican Communion. However, as much as individual bishops
value their Lambeth experiences (and many do), new options now exist for
creating ties between members of the Communion that would involve significantly
more people at a much lower cost, e.g., multiple ways to establish relationships
at all levels using the internet.

Instead of wasting time and energy bemoaning its
demise, saying aloha to the old and the new represents a constructive step forward.